Imperial Debris redirects scholarly focus away from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the environment, and bodies and minds, in the present.
Category: History

How do colonial histories matter to the urgencies and conditions of our current world? How have those histories so often been rendered as leftovers, as "legacies" of a dead past rather than as active and violating forces in the world today? With precision and clarity, Ann Laura Stoler argues that recognizing "colonial presence" may have as much to do with how the connections between colonial histories and the present are expected to look as it does with how they are expected to be. In Duress, Stoler considers what methodological renovations might serve to write histories that yield neither to smooth continuities nor to abrupt epochal breaks. Capturing the uneven, recursive qualities of the visions and practices that imperial formations have animated, Stoler works through a set of conceptual and concrete reconsiderations that locate the political effects and practices that imperial projects produce: occluded histories, gradated sovereignties, affective security regimes, "new" racisms, bodily exposures, active debris, and carceral archipelagos of colony and camp that carve out the distribution of inequities and deep fault lines of duress today.
Category: Social Science

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past. Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities. Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler
Category: Art

Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault's history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? InRace and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault's tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume ofHistory of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault's insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race. Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.
Category: Psychology

At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the significance of rubble encompasses lost cities, derelict train stations, overgrown Jesuit missions and Spanish forts, stranded steamships, mass graves, and razed forests. Examining the effects of these and other forms of debris on the people living on nearby ranches and farms, and in towns, Gordillo emphasizes that for the rural poor, the rubble left in the wake of capitalist and imperialist endeavors is not romanticized ruin but the material manifestation of the violence and dislocation that created it.
Category: Social Science

The city of Nogales straddles the border between Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona. On the Mexican side, a group of marginalized youth calling themselves Barrio Libre (Free 'Hood) employs violence, theft, and bribery to survive, often preying on undocumented migrants using the city's sewer system to cross the border. In this book, Gilberto Rosas draws on his in-depth ethnographic research among the Barrio Libre to understand how the gang operates, why its members have embraced criminality, and the role that neoliberalism and security policies on both sides of the border have played in the youth's descent into Barrio Libre. Rosas argues that although these youth participate in the victimization of others, they should not be demonized. They are complexly and adversely situated. Many are migrants driven to Nogales by the effects of NAFTA. Shadowing the youths through the spaces they inhabit and control, he shows how the militarization of the border actually destabilized the region and led Barrio Libre to turn to even more violent activities like drug trafficking. By focusing this population and their thickening delinquency, Rosas asserts the importance of capitalism and criminality in shaping of perceptions and realities of race, sovereignty, and resistance along the U.S./Mexico border.
Category: History

Praise for the first edition of Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: “Comprehensive, erudite, and compelling.”—Journal of Modern History “Stoler presents a groundbreaking work that emanates from her empirical investigations of the European colonial experiences in Asia of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At the same time, she engages with cutting-edge discussions advanced by postcolonial theorists in recent years. By introducing the issues of race, sexuality, and intimacy into the study of colonialism, or the interactions of Europeans with the indigenous populations in their households and in their personal or sex lives, Stoler offers a fresh look at the European colonial experience, in which the line between the colonizers and the colonized becomes significantly blurred. This 'blurring,' or hybridity, is, of course, an important issue in postcolonial theory, yet Stoler's presentation reveals that this hybridity is not only a theoretical question, but also (though largely absent from the extant scholarship) a reflection of historical reality. Stoler shows that hybridization took place at the personal, quotidian level, where the Europeans interacted actively with the natives, and in the economic arena, where impoverished Europeans were forced to compete with locals for a good living in 'their' colonies. An eye-opening book…. Highly recommended.”—Choice “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power is a compelling text, its dense analysis made accessible and almost visceral by the historical ethnography and scholarly detail…the book offers a rich and intricate account of the imperial project at work and strikes a difficult balance between theory, history, and ethnography in its analysis.”—Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Category: History